Displaying article #3552

July 16, 1999

Visionary Physicist Uses WWW To Create World-Sized Lab

July 16, 1999 -- A research scientist at the University of
Oregon says there is a better way to teach students about
experimental laboratory research than to have them trundling
off to ill-equipped laboratories to do experiments of
questionable real-world value.

Instead, physicist Anatoli Arodzero proposes--and is in the
early stages of creating--a system where students log onto the
World Wide Web (WWW) to access and analyze real scientific
data that is beaming down from satellites, is produced at
particle accelerators and is generated at experimental set-ups
in university labs around the world.

"The current state of lab experiences for students at colleges
and universities is severely undermined by limitations of
time, space and resources," he says. "In addition, the
experience they gain in the laboratory often has little to do
with the real world of research for which their education is
preparing them."

The idea for improving lab instruction began to germinate in
Arodzero's mind in 1987 when he was project manager of
development of the new Department of Fundamental Science at
the Moscow State Technical University (MSTU) in Russia. He
observed an array of problems.

Not all universities can support a wide spectrum of laboratory
research set-ups because of their high price and operation and
maintenance costs and the lack of necessary space. The length
of laboratory sessions--determined by scheduling priorities,
not by scientific necessity--are often too short to fully
research a given process or phenomenon. In many cases,
laboratory instruction, instrumentation and student research
projects do not fully reflect the current level of
professional experimental research.

Since that time, the Internet and WWW have developed and so
has Arodzero's vision of how to address these problems. His
idea has taken shape as the World Wide Student Laboratory
(WWSL).

To demonstrate the idea, Arodzero and his collaborators have
created a WWSL web site on the UO physics department's web
server at http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~wwsl/ and on a mirror site
in Russia. While Arodzero envisions that these hubs will one
day serve as central gateways to hundreds of lab set-ups
around the world in every field of science, one physics set-up
is already functioning. The Cosmic Rays Research Group page
links two student research set-ups--one at the UO and the
other at MSTU--that feature sophisticated cosmic ray
detectors. Students at either university--or, more broadly,
any student anywhere with a WWW connection--can access data
from these labs.

The Russian Ministry of Education has created a special
committee to consider the UO/MSTU model for widespread
implementation as part of their effort to retool the Russian
education system for the coming millennium. Next year,
students enrolled in some laboratory courses at MSTU will use
the WWSL Cosmic Ray Research Group lab site as a regular part
of their coursework.

"Why create costly set-ups at each and every university, when
one set-up can be accessed by thousands of students around the
globe via the Web?" asks Arodzero. "If we can provide cosmic
ray labs, other universities could collaborate to make
available set-ups in other areas of research. Through the
WWSL, all these first-rate lab set-ups could be available to
students at participating institutions."

The WWSL concept is very flexible, he adds, and is not limited
to lab set-ups at universities. He notes that there are vast
amounts of data produced by government research laboratories,
satellites, particle accelerators, telescopes and at other
highly technical facilities around the world--all of which are
already connected to the WWW.

"All that is required to make this data available to students
around the world is some focused work by a small number of
people at a WWW site and for professors to incorporate this
tool into their lessons," he states.

Arodzero stresses the differences between this use of
computers in education and the much more common conception of
computers as a vehicle for "virtual" experiments.

"The virtual experiments are interesting, but often they are
far removed from the real world of research that we are
training our students for," he says. "WWSL students do real
science; that is, their work has all the elements of real
scientific research--using raw data, remote control of real
instruments and data analysis gathered over a longer period of
time and from distant instruments."

Arodzero says there are two other benefits that may be of
special interest to administrators who must wrestle with the
rapidly changing economics of higher education.

"The WWSL is a highly cost-effective use of resources such as
staff time, equipment and laboratory space. And, as outreach
programs more aggressively court student tuition dollars, the
WWSL is ideally suited for distance education," Arodzero adds.

The WWSL can be useful at many levels--from high school to
graduate school. Many high schools, he explains, are investing
significant resources to gain Internet access. The WWSL can
maximize that investment by allowing schools that don't have
sufficient money or staff to nevertheless offer their students
high quality lab experiences via computers.